kangmi: learning korean

In the meantime, I realized I had options once I figured out that anything with a headphone jack could be played through my car stereo. I’ve played audio files from my Palm and cassette tapes on a cassette player (for which I got a power adapter so that I don’t have to use batteries). I’ve copied MP3 files onto a CD-RW and played them in my CD player. In short, I’ve learned that if I have audio, I can play it in my car.

These are early days, so to date I am using the following:

- Pimsleur’s Comprehensive Korean Level 1
- Some old Korean language cassettes I’ve had for a while
- MP3s, either from podcasts or other audio I record off the Internet

The first two will eventually pass, so I will continue to actively pursue recording my own audio from the Internet. More podcasts would be nice, and they wouldn’t even have to be about learning Korean. I’d be happy to hear someone talk about their day.

How do you use your commute to learn Korean?

I actually started exercising in late December, but I didn’t make it a regular habit until about eight weeks ago. And it wasn’t until two weeks ago that I fully implemented my weight training program. Up until then, I was still easing into it, until I was satisfied that taking the next big step wasn’t going to knock me for a loop. And now I’m comfortable enough with my aerobic exercise that I’m going to gradually increase my time until I reach a certain daily level.

Deciding to exercise wasn’t the same as figuring out how to do it. Deciding to learn Korean isn’t the same thing as figuring out how to do it. There’s no one right way to do it, although successful language learners have common characteristics. Motivation, consistency, and focus are certainly key. Variety and routine are both important for me. Immersion is ideal, but lacking that I have to approach my goal in the best way possible, one that uses my time well.

Long ago I was able to commit to learning Korean. My goal hasn’t changed, but I’ll be exploring different ways in which to improve my reading, writing, speaking, and listening. I’m sufficently intrigued by the idea (and results) of intervals to find out if an adaptation would be useful in my language study.

What if you were given that choice? For real. What if it weren’t just the hyperbolic rhetoric that conflates corporate performance with life and death? Not the overblown exhortations of a rabid boss, or a slick motivational speaker, or a self-dramatizing CEO. We’re talking actual life or death now. Your own life or death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think and act? If you didn’t, your time would end soon—a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change really mattered? When it mattered most?

Yes, you say?

Try again.

Yes?

You’re probably deluding yourself.

You wouldn’t change.

Don’t believe it? You want odds? Here are the odds, the scientifically studied odds: nine to one. That’s nine to one against you. How do you like those odds?

Deutschman continues:

Dr. Raphael “Ray” Levey, ... told the audience, “A relatively small percentage of the population consumes the vast majority of the health-care budget for diseases that are very well known and by and large behavioral.” That is, they’re sick because of how they choose to live their lives, not because of environmental or genetic factors beyond their control. Continued Levey: “Even as far back as when I was in medical school"—he enrolled at Harvard in 1955—"many articles demonstrated that 80% of the health-care budget was consumed by five behavioral issues.” Levey didn’t bother to name them, but you don’t need an MD to guess what he was talking about: too much smoking, drinking, eating, and stress, and not enough exercise.

Framing change

Deutschman highlights three factors common to people who are successful at making behavioral changes. The first is how people view their motivation for change. Fear of death, for example, leads to denial, not to lasting change. What’s important is frame the motivation in a positive way—"joy of living” versus “fear of dying.”

Pioneering research in cognitive science and linguistics has pointed to the paramount importance of framing. George Lakoff, a professor of those two disciplines at the University of California at Berkeley, defines frames as the “mental structures that shape the way we see the world.” Lakoff says that frames are part of the “cognitive unconscious,” but the way we know what our frames are, or evoke new ones, springs from language. For example, we typically think of a company as being like an army—everyone has a rank and a codified role in a hierarchical chain of command with orders coming down from high to low. Of course, that’s only one way of organizing a group effort. If we had the frame of the company as a family or a commune, people would know very different ways of working together.

I can make a good case for reframing my motivation to study Korean. More later.

Radical change

Reframing alone isn’t enough, of course. That’s where Dr. [Dean] Ornish’s other astonishing insight comes in. Paradoxically, he found that radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are often easier for people than small, incremental ones. For example, he says that people who make moderate changes in their diets get the worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they aren’t eating everything they want, but they aren’t making big enough changes to quickly see an improvement in how they feel, or in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol. But the heart patients who went on Ornish’s tough, radical program saw quick, dramatic results, reporting a 91% decrease in frequency of chest pain in the first month. “These rapid improvements are a powerful motivator,” he says. “When people who have had so much chest pain that they can’t work, or make love, or even walk across the street without intense suffering find that they are able to do all of those things without pain in only a few weeks, then they often say, ‘These are choices worth making.’ “

There are good arguments for making small changes rather than large ones. Over the last couple of months I’ve been implementing an exercise program that includes both weight training and running (health issues have prevented me from exercising for the last couple of years). I started slowly, more slowly than ever before, so slowly that telling you the details would be embarassing, because no one is supposed to be that slow. But slowly enough to learn that I wasn’t going to get sick or exhausted. My weight training consists of alternate sessions of low weight/high reps and high weight low reps. I’m now bench pressing more than I ever did when I used to regularly weight train (every recent high weight session has resulted in a new personal best). Running is mostly walking still, but I’m running intervals, and gradually I’ve been able to increase my speed in both the running and walking.

Should my language study be more like intervals, or do I go for “radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes”?

Supporting change

Even when leaders have reframed the issues brilliantly, it’s still vital to give people the multifaceted support they need. That’s a big reason why 90% of heart patients can’t change their lifestyles but 77% of Ornish’s patients could—because he buttressed them with weekly support groups with other patients, as well as attention from dieticians, psychologists, nurses, and yoga and meditation instructors.

Language self-study can be lonely. I’ve met some great people in the course of my studies, but I’m realizing that I need some kind of regular support network. I’m not sure what that is, or what it will look like, but it has to be bigger than once a week with 인선.

I’m not going to die if I never learn Korean well. But change is required in order to succeed. Your feedback is solicited.